tempus fugit

Netanyahu Denounced for Saying Palestinian Inspired Holocaust – The New York Times

2015-10-22

Mark Regev, the prime minister’s spokesman, referred reporters to Mr. Netanyahu’s 1993 book, “A Place Among the Nations,” which details the mufti’s close ties to Nazis and uses Nuremberg testimony to buttress the argument that the mufti protested plans to expel Jews from Europe and promoted the Final Solution.

“The mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser” in the “execution of this plan,” the book quotes Adolf Eichmann’s deputy, Dieter Wisliceny, as having testified. “He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures.”

But the book says that the mufti “met Hitler in person for the first time” on Nov. 28, 1941 — two months before the Final Solution was formalized and the construction of extermination camps accelerated, according to historians, but after the mass murder of Jews had begun, and roughly one million had perished.

Professor Zimmermann, the Hebrew University historian, said on Israel Radio that Mr. Netanyahu was “doing something he must not do,” and that in “the protocol” of the 1941 meeting between the mufti and Hitler, “the text that Netanyahu speaks of does not appear.”

“He moves the responsibility of the Holocaust, for the destruction of the Jews, to the mufti and the Arab world,” Professor Zimmermann said. “This is a trick intended to stain the Arabs of today because of the Arabs of the past. To pile on the Arabs of the past by easing up on the Germans of the past.”

What’s the argument? Adolf Hitler wanted to exterminate the Jews. The “Palestinian” Grand Mufti of Jerusalem wanted to exterminate the Jews. The Grand Mufti worked with Adolf Eichman. The Grand Mufti influenced Adolf Hitler to exterminate rather than expel the Jews? Maybe.